Sidekick Moves From the Cloud to the Court Room

By Jeff Gamet

Oct 15th, 2009 2:34 PM EDT

Only days after T-Mobile confirmed that a Microsoft server failure lost Sidekick user personal data, the company has been hit with two lawsuits. The two class action lawsuits claim that T-Mobile led customers to believe their personal data protected from loss, according to MediaPost.

One of the Sidekick's selling features was that user data -- including contacts, schedules, tasks and photos -- is stored online so they always have access to the information. When Microsoft's server failed, however, all of that data was lost and Sidekick owners were told the information they were storing online probably wouldn't be recoverable.

Microsoft has since announced that it most likely has recovered the lost Sidekick data and will be restoring the information to user accounts soon.

While the news that the data is being recovered, it's not enough to make some Sidekick owners happy. Both lawsuits allege that T-Mobile was negligent by not ensuring adequate backup procedures were in place.

"T-Mobile's advertising did not disclose that T-Mobile had no backup or other service or device to ensure that the customer's stored data could be retrieved if there was a failure," said Oren Rosenthal in his case against T-Mobile.

Both cases highlight consumer trust in cloud computing's promise of always available data and applications, and how quickly they can turn when that trust is broken. They also highlight the importance of handling your own data backups to supplement cloud-based storage.